McAdams On: The Curse of Instancy

5/7/2010 2:00:04 PM

The Internet Age is one of instant reactivity.
There’s no need for patience any longer; no need for deliberation. Now we can
do things like crash the market with a keystroke and then watch it happen in
real time.

It was numbing yesterday to watch the market once again fall off of a cliff. The
Dow Jones lost nearly 1,000 points. Something about Greeks apparently receiving
the government pensions of great aunts. Once the slide started, money moved en
masse from tech stocks to gold, firearms, bottled water and night-vision
goggles.

The reactivity phenomenon applies to almost anything on the Internet. Nothing encourages
impulse buying like a broadband connection. Proponents of the FCC’s National
Broadband Plan endlessly plug its supposed economic beneficence, but who knows
how many bankruptcies, mortgage defaults and how much just plain overspending it
encourages?

This is not proffered as an argument against the hallowed broadband plan, but
come on. Some of those extolled small businesses are the modern-day snake
oilers who can now gain direct access into someone’s checking account. They all
know most of us are doing at least two or three things simultaneously while we’re
online. And that reading fine print typically isn’t one of them. A huge amount
of revenue is undoubtedly generated through buried “membership” or “automatic
renewal” sign-ups that take an act of God and at least three payments to
cancel.

There are laws against false advertising in general, but the ’Net takes it to a
new level with these kind of schemes. Instead of going after Comcast for
throttling, the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission ought to do something
about terms-and-conditions statements. They should all be limited to 400 words
by law, though the commission should start at two because it will have to
negotiate away the other 398.

Few people have the time and fewer still the law degree to parse terms and
conditions. The very nature of the Internet is one of immediacy. Sometimes the
immediacy is in opposition to accuracy. We all get the e-mails about rip-offs,
exotic cancers, heart-attack symptoms, inaccurate mean-spirited political rants
and erroneous slander. We get them because there’s some sort of default in the
collective subconscious that if something’s in typeface, it must be true.

Correlatively, if lardcicles were offered for sale in typeface, people would buy them.

I’ve certainly stepped in the goo of inaccuracy in the name of immediacy. Nothing
means as much as getting it right--except for getting it out. In my case,
however, there’s no one else to blame. It makes “breaking news” into a double
entendre.

The traditional form of “breaking news” is an artifact of the days when
newspapers were printed in the middle of the night and three TV news operations
competed. Breaking news is now more pandemic than breaking. It heads out over
the Internet the way stories used to once go out over wire systems. The
difference is, wires had a procedure for corrections before something made it
into typeface.

The Internet has replaced wire services and given everyone contributory access.
Consequently, there’s so much information out there, it’s impossible to fully
comprehend all of it. The only thing we can control is our reactivity. Unless
we’re heavily invested in tech stocks and short on gold.